Example:
User is digitising new (line, poly) features and accidentally adds additional vertices within very small distance of previous vertex, resulting in redundant vertices. I want to prevent this from happening within the current editing environment (ArcGIS 10.x). Back in workstation this could be accomplished using WEED tolerance parameter in the ARCEDIT editing environment. It seems there is no equivalent in ArcGIS.

I've been offered a couple of answers to this question, both of which have been inadequate thus far:Answer - Change the XY resolution or XY tolerance of the feature class.I absolutely do not want to do either of these as it creates geometry problems in the data. I don't want to change anything about the storage of the data itself, this would be like changing the coverage precision.

Answer - Use the 'classic' snapping environment and snap to sketch vertices and set the tolerance to a minimum distance value.While this might eliminate some of these occurences, it does not actually prevent the user from creating redundant vertices. It also requires additional validation work afterwards to identify and fix possible errors (check geometry, topology etc.). I am trying to minimise errors at the editing stage while also reducing the amount of work to validate the data.

So the question boils down to "I used to be able to do this? Why can't I now?". The answer could well be "There is no equivalent, deal with it". I'm hoping this isn't the case though.

3 Answers
3

Even though you said XY Tolerance is inadequate, it is the answer to your question. Read the ArcGIS Online Help article called "Feature class basics", and subsection "Feature tolerances", subsection "X,y tolerance"

Online Help for X,y tolerance:

Feature processing operations are influenced by the x,y tolerance, which determines the minimum distance separating all feature coordinates (nodes and vertices) during those operations. By definition, it also defines the distance a coordinate can move in x or y (or both) during clustering operations. ... The x,y tolerance is an extremely small distance (the default is 0.001 meters in on-the-ground units). It is used to resolve inexact intersection locations of coordinates during clustering operations.

You can create a topology and specify a (larger than default) cluster tolerance. Then, when the user validates the topology it will then clean up those redundant vertices. Here is the start of the help pages for topology.

edit - Thanks for your answer. While using cluster tolerance does fix some of the errors, it also introduces new ones. Long, skinny polygons for example can be snapped back onto there own boundaries or dissolved completely. The user has no control over where and how this tolerance modifies the data. The data we are working with is geological boundaries and line features, which can differ vastly in size and shape. As I said earlier, we want to minimise the error introduced at the editing/construction stage. WEED tolerance was a parameter of the editing environment, which could be altered on-the-fly much like snapping tolerances can/could.